17th DEGREE

• Jeff Attwood, of Coding Horror, had a really good post about the default installation of WordPress not coming with any built in caching. If your WordPress site gets any decent traffic, you have to install some sort of caching plugin. In fact, Dreamhost 1-click installs come with wp-cache already installed. Thankfully, there is a Google Summer of Code project for adding caching capabilities to WordPress. Also, if you take a look at the article linked above, Jeff has updated his post to reflect some MySQL config params given to him by Matt Mullenwag, the creator of WordPress, which should help optimize the DB for WordPress.
• The cause of Jeff’s post about WordPress is a new site he’s developing called stackoverflow.com. Jeff is partnering with Joel, of Joel on Software fame, on this new venture. The purpose of the site is to be a place where people can ask programming related questions. Oh, and it’s free. Unlike Experts Exchange, which, if memory served me, used to partially free at some time, but then went totally pay-site and consequently totally blows. That site sucks because it gets linked too all the time when you google your question. However, when you try and see the A+ rated answer, or whatever it is now, it tells you that to see it you’ve got to pay. Hopefully Stack Overflow will be a really useful site and I can stop accidentally following links to Experts Exchange.
• A little while ago, I read about a few new interesting updates to Amazon’s Grid services. Namely, adding elastic IPs, which is just programmatically reassigning IPs instead of doing it at a DNS level. They added some availability zones, but I wouldn’t be doing anything that would care where the data center was geographically, but perhaps it would matter to someone. And finally, they plan to add some persistent storage offerings for their EC2 platform. Normally, storage is handed off to their S3 service, but apparently you’ll be able to allocate large chunks of storage whenever you need to solely on the EC2 side of things.
• How much ass has the Webkit team been kicking lately?  Earlier this week they released CSS Reflections, a few days before that they came out with CSS Masks, and before that it was CSS Gradients.  Reflections remind me of that Java Applet people used to have on their blogs, well before they were called blogs, where you would supply an image - almost always a water related image - and it would add a water flowing effect to the bottom of it.  Ah, the day.  I’m sure some neat stuff will come out of all this.  Especially for products that directly use the Webkit engine.  Safari usually has a lag time of a few months before it gets new Webkit goodies.  All these recent additions make me think that you’ll need to use a lot less image-mojo to get the designery effects you desire in your designs.  Well, as soon as all relevant browsers support them.  What’s nice is that Webkit is offering these features to the W3C WG as potential future specs.

Anywho, that’s it for now.  I just had a few links in my feed reader that I’ve been meaning to comment on.  Have a nice day.

According to someone who is liveblogging The Future Of MySQL, MySQL 6, which is currently in alpha, will have some interesting new features that I’m pretty excited to see:

• a non-blocking replacement of mysqldump for all engines - InnoDB isn’t blocking because it’s transactional, but MyISAM tables are blocking
• a new default, transactional storage engine - replacing InnoDB as the default I assume?
• foreignKeys will be in all storage engines - handy

Lots of neat stuff.

When I think about the application my work used when I first started, I think of this picture:

Found at: http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/

The following command, well combined commands, will give you a list of your ten most used shell commands. Just nerdy, really.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head

82  grep
74  svn
68  cd
53  ls
31  top20
26  emacs
22  system
17  less
14  rm
13  su

Via James

BTW, I’m at the South By Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) thing again this year. W00t for me.

I woke up at 5am to make my way to the airport. I flew Southwest to Austin by way of Dallas. Unlike everyone else who flew the day before, I had 0 problems. I’m quite happy about that. I hopped a ride in the nicest cab I’ve ever ridden in. It was a brand new, taxicab-yellow Dodge Charger. I also conversed with the most interesting cab driver I’ve ever met. We talked about his troubles interfacing his website with a mysql backend. It was fun to be knowledgeable.

I’m at the Raddison again this year. While it is a little further away from the convention center, it’s not nearly as far away as the La Quinta that I stayed at my first year. Never doing that again, let me tell you. I checked in early, they thankfully had a room already available, even though it was 11:30ish when I checked in and normal check in is 3pm. Yay for that.

I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so I checked in with Jeffy and met him and some other folks - Nathan, Christian, Sara, and for a short time Sarah. I had a so-so caesar burger with waffle fries. Oh, and roughly 5 Negra Modellos and a White Russian. Tasty. This was the first and second time I heard Jeff’s story about Ariel Waldman.

After that, I headed down to the convention center to pick up my badge. This process, according to everyone else I talked to, was to be a very quick process. In fact, it was to be “the fastest it’s ever been.” Those people are fucking liars. I believe from when I joined the line to when I got my actual badge in hand, it was about an hour.

Afterwards, I headed back to the hotel to grab a quick nap before the nights festivities. There is an annual initial party called ‘Mix at Six,’ which is held at a bar called Six. I got there around 6:20ish. The line was around the block. Quite different from previous years. I caught up with a bunch of folks and we headed down to the always popular Iron Cactus for some dinner. By the time we got there, it became known that Mike Davidson wasn’t going to make it down to SXSW. In accordance with this, everyone had to do a Jager shot in his honor. I hate this Devil liquid. Dinner was quite good though: chicken burrito with white cream sauce with beans and spanish rice. Rice could have been cooked a little longer, but c’est la vie. Also: two Negra Modellos. Mmm. Also, this is where Jeff met the previously mentioned Ariel and told his story to her. He also told it to our table - so it was my third time hearing it that day.

After dinner, it was time to drink. So, we headed down to the Ginger Man. The Ginger Man is a lot like Barley’s Brewhouse in KC, only with not quite as many taps. I had a New Belgium 1554 and a Paulaner Hefe-Weizen which was too orangey. I also played in a team pool game with Christian, Jon, and Josh. We lost, I was kind of drunk.

At some point we decided we needed to go to the previously mentioned Six. I had a delicious Red Stripe downstairs and then we headed up to the upstairs balcony. The funniest part of this section of the evening was Josh trying to talk. See his twitter around that time for further explanation.

Around 11 I bounced and headed to bed, called the wife, and fell asleep in the 800-pillow bed.